==> Not sure if I even mentioned it here, because the main event sold out…but anyway I will be at the “Anarchy in the NYC” event this Saturday. Afterward there is a karaoke party hosted by Tatiana Moroz, but you need a ticket to get in. (I am now calling myself a professional singer for this very reason. It’s a technicality, I grant you.)

==> I am sure some would draw parallels to people warning of (price) inflation, and the struggling climate scientists. I am sure Paul Krugman will be coming down hard on the scientists and their 13 years of bad model predictions…

==> As someone who does a lot of work involving Excel tables, this story horrifies me. You can choose not to believe me, but I would feel bad if this happened to Krugman. I mean, sure I go back and check for just this type of thing–make sure I didn’t inadvertently copy the wrong formula, try to get the same number by a different order of operations, etc.–but ultimately it’s tough to guard against something like this. You can say, “What about peer review?!” but in that case, you’ve never refereed a paper…

==> Speaking of Krugman: I guess it’s not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but in his hit piece on Bitcoin, we have yet another Kontradiction. Early in the piece Krugman remarks on the “strangeness” (his word) of Bitcoin because they “derive their value, if any, purely from self-fulfilling prophecy, the belief that other people will accept them as payment.” Then he concludes the article by saying:

Goldbugs and bitbugs alike seem to long for a pristine monetary standard, untouched by human frailty. But that’s an impossible dream. Money is, as Paul Samuelson once declared, a “social contrivance,” not something that stands outside society. Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment.”

So it’s kind of a weird article. Krugman wants to mock the Randian libertarian types who like Bitcoin, and early on he says it’s not like gold because it’s utterly dependent on its role as a medium of exchange, and then he concludes by saying the people who like Bitcoin need to read Samuelson, who explained that money is ultimately valued because it is a medium of exchange.

Again, not a contradiction per se, just a Kontradiction. Sort of like, “It actually makes sense to like Bitcoin, but the people who like it right now are doing so for the wrong reason.”

60 Responses to “Potpourri”

As an active climate research scientist, I can say its going to take a lot more than a little over a decade of global temperature stabilization to dissuade some in the field about positive feedback cycles and future anthropogenic warming. For now I will keep those opinions to myself…

re: “I am sure some would draw parallels to people warning of (price) inflation, and the struggling climate scientists. I am sure Paul Krugman will be coming down hard on the scientists and their 13 years of bad model predictions”

So Bob, do you think Japan’s lost decade means that we can chuck all those models that predict “man made economic growth”?

Do climate models predict that there will be no fluctuations in climate? I’m not a climate scientist – that’s an obvious question. But I know enough about how dynamic systems work out to think they probably don’t.

OK – I am submitting to you that if climate models are anything like a lot of dynamic models with exogenous noise out there, they in fact do not predict some kind of clean trend that isn’t periodically interrupted or subject to slowing or temporary reversion.

Unless you know better and can inform the rest of us, I’m going to work off the assumption that climate models work like a lot of other dynamic models.

Upwards trends don’t have to be “clean”. As long as the volatility is within a certain range, the AGW models that predict an upward trend are taking into account volatility.

But the AGW models that are relevant here failed to predict just how far outside the overall trend global tempoeratures will go, hence the “struggles” currently being experienced by the climate modellers.

Come on guys – this is exactly why I’ve raised an example that has a longer departure from trend but that isn’t leading anyone to toss growth theory out the window. Can you try to engage the issues at hand here?

Why do you think 13 years of slow down is “too much” aside from the fact that you want it to be “too much”? Do you have any standard for judging that in that way whatsoever?

Daniel_Kuehn, do you know what “apples to apples” refers to? You’re comparing to the use of Japan as evidence against a very broad theory of what causes economic growth (that it’s man made). But no, Japan’s experience doesn’t deviate from that theory. Global temperatures, *even after taking into account volatility*, do in fact deviate from the comparable theory.

But I can understand why you feel your best option at this point is argue in circles.

“I’ve raised an example that has a longer departure from trend but that isn’t leading anyone to toss growth theory out the window.”

Which growth theory? The one about economic growth being man-made? Because there is no trend from which it would depart. Or are you (surprise surprise!) changing the comparison in the middle of an argument without changing the rest?

Why don’t you clarify your thoughts on the issue and lay them out before going further, so we know you’re arguing a consistent position?

What argument has changed? Pick any growth theory. “Man-made economic growth” was a shout out to anthropogenic climate change. Sound, reasonable people recognize that there are processes that cause cycles, oscillations, stagnations, and spurts in economic activity without at all invalidating growth theory.

Somehow when it validates their sensibilities they don’t get this with climate change.

And what do I get from you? Assertion. You just give me: “Global temperatures, *even after taking into account volatility*, do in fact deviate from the comparable theory.”

And I assert the opposite.

Here’s the difference between my assertion and your assertion (because neither of us are climate scientists):

1. Mine seems to be the view held by climate scientists that do know these models.

2. Mine is consistent with dynamic systems in general that can exhibit different high and low frequency behavior.

3. Mine is parsimonious and doesn’t require some elaborate explanation of why climate systems behave differently from other dynamic systems.

You can keep making assertions all you want Silas, but if you ever want me to take you seriously you have to at least provide arguments for your assertions – if not a full fledged explanation of exactly what these climate models entail (which I’m sure you’re not up to).

Something tells me that it’s not arguments you want, but rather intellectual acceptance of your beliefs, even if there are good reasons to reject them or question them.

You may want to consider the possibility that you would have trouble recognizing if an argument has been presented, seeing as how you believe the blanket assertion that climate change models are able to take into account the recent temperature variations. That’s just wrong. The whole reason climate scientists are “struggling” is precisely because the actual has deviated sufficiently outside their range of variation over the last 10 or so years.

Ohhhhh … I get it now, Daniel_Kuehn, your inept comparison to “man-made economic growth” was just a “shout-out”, and you *really* meant, um, whatever theory would make your analogy work and your point valid.

(EDENHOFER): Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet – and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 – there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

(NZZ): De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

(EDENHOFER): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

Obviously it partly derives its value from government regulation, but more of the dollars value is derived from the market today than it was under the gold standard.

I always think of fiat money as money that has no intrinsic value and is not guaranteed to convert into any underlying commodity. In that sense, Bitcoin is absolutely fiat it just happens to be a fiat money that is kept highly inelastic by design (which differentiates it from most other fiat monies and IMO is its principle weakness).

Fiat does not mean backed by nothing, even though fiat money is indeed backed by nothing.

Fiat means “by decree”, meaning the law, meaning what those in the state impose via coercion.

Yes, if a money is backed by coercion, those in control have an incentive to remove any backing if there is one. That’s why, historically, fiat money has become synonymous with “backed by nothing”.

By understanding fiat money as meaning “backed by nothing”, it is more likely that you will mistake other monies that are not imposed by law, to be fiat nonetheless, even though there is no “by decree” associated with them, e.g. bitcoins.

I know what the word “fiat” on its own means. This conversation is about what the term “fiat money” means.

Fiat money is fiat on its own as a predicate of money on its own.

“And I never said anything about “backed by nothing”. I said that it doesn’t have intrinsic value and that it is not convertible to a commodity on demand.”

By “backed by nothing”, I meant not convertible to any commodity. If you want to say “not convertible to any commodity”, instead of “backed by nothing”, then fine, it’s still the case that fiat doesn’t mean that either.

Instead of taxing people in dollars, the government starts to tax people in gold. No matter what you earn, you have to pay a portion of your income in in “equivalent” gold taxes (at whatever applicable exchange rate).

Also, the courts start making judgments against (guilty) defendants who are ordered to pay the (winning) plaintiff in gold ounces, not dollars.

Government regulations influence the value of the loaf of bread I buy. I don’t think it would be outlandish of me to nevertheless claim that the value of bread in the American economy is not derived from regulation.

Anyway, in case anyone was wacky enough to read me that way that’s why I followed up with “Obviously it partly derives its value from government regulation, but more of the dollars value is derived from the market today than it was under the gold standard.”

I actually wrote that post in response to your first one to martin, and then when I clicked submit, your second post appeared that conceded that yes, regulations do play a role. We were typing at the same time.

I understand your (new) argument about “influence”, but my argument goes further. I am saying regulations are the primary, if not the sole, causal factor for why people are at present using the government’s fiat notes as money.

I asked you what do you think would happen if the regulations changed, from taxing and adjudicating people in dollars, to taxing and adjuciating people in [fill in the blank]. Do you believe that people will go on using dollars as money? Maybe for a time, but soon, don’t you think dollars would cease being money?

You went from asking “Does the dollar really derive it’s value from government regulation?” in your first post, to “Obviously it partly derives its value from government regulation” in your second post.

This new statement in your second post is actually not as important as the issue of whether or not regulations are why dollars are money.

I am asking: What do you think will happen if the government changed the regulations away from taxation and adjudication in dollars to [fill in the blank] instead?

I agree that this is what Krugman meant but it’s kind of a superficial critique.

I don’t think hard money folks are against fiat currency per se; they just don’t like aggressive monetary expansion. No central bank can “print” bitcoins, so it behaves more like hard money than dollars or other government-issued currencies.

As someone who does a lot of work involving Excel tables, this story horrifies me.

FTA:

“…all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”

This seems like a devastating blow, but the intellectual foundation for austerity is not to be found in historical data points that can be interpreted in more than one way. Let’s suppose the data points show high growth rates alongside high government debt loads. One could argue that the growth would have been even higher had the government debt been lower during those periods. As a corrolary, one could also argue that nobody can actually ever see high government debt shrinking or growing or having no effect on real growth. Even if government debt was found to be negatively correlated with real growth worldwide, I wouldn’t use that as proof that austerity works either. For one could argue that real growth would have been even lower had the government debt been lower.

With regard to climate models, it’s true that there are non-man made factors that influence global temperature as well as man made factors that might have a cooling effect (e.g. sulfur emissions). So you wouldn’t necessarily expect temperatures to go up by a constant amount each year.

On the other hand, if temperatures failed to rise over a long period of time (say, the next fifty years), then you would have to say that there was a problem with the models.

An absence of warming of 10-15 years is somewhere in the middle. I don’t think it’s enough to say that the theory has been disproven, but it’s long enough (particularly if there is no good explanation of what is offsetting the expected warming) that it should reduce our confidence in the models somewhat. In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver suggests that the absence of warming in the last decade ought to reduce our confidence in AGW from around 95% to 85% certainty, which sounds about right.

If I recall the forthcoming IPCC report shows that global temperatures have most recently exited the 75% confidence interval of the model ensemble mean. 10-15 years is a big deal but there have been some interesting talks about what may be causing this “unexpected” stall in global temperatures.

The Bruckner cycle is approx 30 years, perhaps as much as 35 years. No one has a definitive cause for it, but plenty of historic data shows this type of oscillation. Climate scientists (rather arbitrarily) defined 30 years as the minimum time that distinguishes “weather” from “climate” because they wanted to avoid contamination from this cycle (it’s discussed in the stolen emails, if you have no life). Thus, 15 years is probably the worst time sample, being half a cycle.

I’ll point out that many other cycles exist around this ballpark, for example the 11 year and 22 year solar cycles. It is very difficult to make order out of chaos.

On that note the climate scientists do tend to hit the TV pretty quickly when you get a few above average hot days in a row… and no they don’t tell the news reporter “this is really insignificant”. Mind you, research grants are money in the bank, and everything else is wiggly lines, so I don’t entirely blame those guys.

The problem is that we are urged to take drastic action in the near term. It’s a bit dodgy to defend that but claim you can only be disproved in the long term. Quick, kill all the redheads, I’ll know in 50 years if they were dangerous.

Another problem is that as soon as you have killed the redheads, you cannot be proven wrong any more, since 50 years later you can always say “See nothing bad (what we predicted) happened because we did the right thing in the past.”

He seems to be making three claims that cannot all be true at the same time:

1. what gives bitcoins value is the expectation that other people will accept it as payment (he writes this in the context of mocking libertarians for not liking fiat government money while at the same time being excited about Bitcoin)

2. the expectation that other people will accept a money as payment is a sufficient condition for that money to have a social nature,

3. bitcoins do not have a social nature.

In order to avoid the contradiction Krugman would somehow have to argue that when he wrote “Even when people relied on gold and silver coins, what made those coins useful wasn’t the precious metals they contained, it was the expectation that other people would accept them as payment” he didn’t mean that this expectation was also what gave gold and silver money a social nature. And it is true that he doesn’t literally say that gold and silver money have a social nature (one that bitcoins in his mind lack), let alone that they have it because of this expectation. He only says that said expectation is what made those coins useful.

But it seems impossible to read the actual sentence, especially in context, and not conclude that here he was contrasting gold and silver on the one hand with bitcoins on the other with respect to their embeddedness within society, i.e. with respect to their social nature, and claiming that gold and silver have a social nature because of people’s expectations that other people will accept gold and silver as payment. He seems to present this as a sufficient condition (but not as a necessary condition as he also seems to mention the State’s backing of fiat money as something that gives that money its social nature).

And so I can;t find a way to read the article in which there is not a colossal contradiction (and not a mere Kontradiction).

I’m on a trip so I have to be quick: Guys, I’m not pulling a stunt like some guy in Brooklyn weighing in on the controversy because he snapped a picture of his backyard with his iPhone. I’m linking to a news story in which professionals are struggling with the lack of warming that their models predicted. It quotes one of the leading guys in the economics of climate change (Tol) who says he is now having doubts.

You know I never liked the phrase “the Earth is warming”. Its like taking a picture of a car and then saying “boy that car is really moving!”… sloppy language, as your Brooklyn buddy has shown.

I said it before, but 10-15 years of climate slowing SHOULD make any person question their model and it IS making people question. Some think the CO2 feedback warming is being masked, some think feedbacks are may have been overestimated, some think there is an unknown or accelerated heat sink, some think there is an important negative cloud feedback not being captured…. and on and on and on

Its very unlikely someone will come out and say “hey guys the scientific community was wrong about this”. Slowly but surely the tenor will change and ebb and flow and clarity or “I was wrong” will be something someone says looking at what they thought a two decades ago. Nobody likes being wrong now, but being wrong in the distant past means you can claim growth and wisdom. hooray! everybody wins! (except in the short-term)

* It keeps on rising until it can radiate away its energy (which is a lot of energy thanks to latent heat).

* The condensed water falls again cooling the surface where it lands (generally not the place it rose from thanks to coriolis forces, and because some places on the Earth’s surface are reliably warmer than other places).

If you think about it, the troposphere is whatever size and shape it needs to be in order to lose enough energy, so if the warm moist air finds itself not losing enough heat (for whatever reason) then it keeps rising. There’s no way it can build up somewhere. Since CO2 is heavier than air, the H2O always gets the upper hand, if you see what I mean.

If there was a glass ceiling above the Earth preventing this convection (like there is in a greenhouse) we might see some warming.

Its very unlikely someone will come out and say “hey guys the scientific community was wrong about this”.

I am sure some would draw parallels to people warning of (price) inflation, and the struggling climate scientists. I am sure Paul Krugman will be coming down hard on the scientists and their 13 years of bad model predictions…

Hang on a moment, if there was no increase in the cost of living for 13 years straight, even in the face of continuous QE right through that time period, then yeah I would absolutely be rethinking my whole economic understanding… but that ain’t what happened.

I think this is a revealing quote in light of the Kenneth Roggof debate from Krugman:
“I was going to post something sort of kind of defending Reinhart-Rogoff in the wake of the new revelations — not their results, which I never believed, nor their failure to carefully test their results for robustness, but rather their motives. But their response to the new critique is really, really bad.”

So he says he never believed the results anyway! Obviously it doesn’t really matter if they were subject to an error or not, what does that tell you? That he doesn’t care about facts that doesn’t fit his a priori story anyway.

Though I am a little disappointed that I can’t see now what his “something sort of kind of defending Reinhart-Rogoff in the wake of the new revelations” had sounded like..

As someone who does a lot of work involving Excel tables, this story horrifies me. You can choose not to believe me, but I would feel bad if this happened to Krugman. I mean, sure I go back and check for just this type of thing–make sure I didn’t inadvertently copy the wrong formula, try to get the same number by a different order of operations, etc.–but ultimately it’s tough to guard against something like this. You can say, “What about peer review?!” but in that case, you’ve never refereed a paper…

Peer review in the journal sense, ain’t worth much. They should release the data to open review on day one and you would find that there would be issues with a very large number of papers.

That said, I think the coding error is small in as much as it only skips one nation (Belgium) which actually has any meaningful data in that column at all. Belgium is itself a small country, and particularly unusual… especially when you consider the influence of the EU. They were right to give it a low weighting.

More than that, there’s a really big conceptual problem with correlating the effect of public debt while ignoring private debt, and there’s a doubly big problem presuming that every year stands alone as an independent sample point (presuming that all effects in an economy are necessarily short term effects).